The Scientific Study Of Climate Archives - 1514 Words

Introduction Paleoclimatology is the scientific study of Earth’s past climate using indirect data (â€Å"Paleoclimatology†, 2015). Since the Industrial Revolution studying climate archives is important because anthropogenic effects have become a prominent factor in climatic variation and they allow scientist to get an idea of past climatic variation in order to predict future climatic trends (Redinger, 2006). The indirect indicators that are used in climate archives are known as climate proxies (Ruddiman, 2013). There are 4 main climatic archives which are ice, trees, corals and sediments however this paper will take an in depth look at ice and corals. The period of interest is the Holocene, which is 10000 years ago when both of these†¦show more content†¦Glacial ice is created through the annual deposition of snow that piles up in continuous sequences due to vast plateaus (Bethan, 2014). There are 2 main ice sheets present on Earth today. The first one is loc ated in Greenland and dates up to 125,000 years ago while the other is the Antarctic ice sheet that dates up to 800,000 years ago (Ruddiman, 2013). Ice thickness can provide clues about the local precipitation and thicker layers corresponds to greater snowfall which tells us about global temperatures due to the fact that more snow tends to accumulate at the poles during global warm spells. However, majority of the data about past climate is gained from ice cores, are produced when the ice sheets are drilled on the major axis of growth at about 4-5 inches in diameter and up to lengths of 1m in order to get a vertical core that can be stored for analysis. Ice cores are not limited to polar regions, they can be found on 6 of the 7 continents of Earth and can range in thickness from mountain glaciers to continental ice sheet (Ruddiman, 2013) (Figure 2). However the 2